


Narada's Children

by LadyJanelly



Series: Narada's Children [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, non-sexual mpreg, not sure how far the relationship end of things will go before the plot concludes, preslash?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-09 09:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11666037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: Nero is dead, killed by a previously unknown person on the Narada. This man, this 'Kirk' holds the lives of a million Vulcans in his hands and the first thing he wants is a doctor.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jadejabberwock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadejabberwock/gifts).



> Okay so I wrote a little more of this? Thanks for all the encouraging notes I got on the first part, as old as it was. You woke the muse, apparently. I usually don't post things on the archive unless I'm sure it'll be done, but I don't really have a following for this elsewhere. I will do my best to continue working on it, but summer is a rough time schedule-wise. 
> 
> It has been sooo long since I was in this fandom, and I only ever watched the first movie. If something is wrong canon-wise, feel free to let me know. I might change it or might just note that it's not compliant with whatever.

Spock strides down the Enterprise’s corridors, his footfalls coming at the absolute maximum speed that a commanding officer can traverse the space without inciting panic among an already-stressed crew. 

He turns into sickbay, into the controlled chaos. Every biobed is full, all the staff operating at peak efficiency. Orders are shouted to nurses and orderlies, triage performed to give the most aid to those who would live with it and die without it. 

He looks for the head doctor. That would be McCoy now. 

“Doctor,” he calls, moving in front of him. 

“Whatever it is, I don’t have time for it,” McCoy replies, not looking up from his tasks. 

“I have to disagree with you,” Spock says. “An issue has arisen that requires your attention. Nero has been killed by someone on his ship. The person calls themselves ‘Kirk’. They have demanded our best physician, on threat of crashing the Narada into the city of ShiKahr. The patient is presumably a female of unknown species. We have no further information.”

McCoy spares him a glance at that. Goes back to running the skeletal re generator over a human ensign’s pelvis. 

“And that’s me? The sacrificial lamb?”

“I am looking for volunteers,” Spock corrects. Humans tend to prefer the illusion of choice. Illogical though he finds it, it is more expedient to give McCoy the option. 

McCoy looks around at his staff, the doctors and medics working frantically. Spock presumes that he is considering who he would choose to send in his stead. 

“I’m guessing you’re gonna beam my molecules over there?” He begins to gather supplies, grabbing two cases that have yet to be opened. 

Spock nods. “Kirk has instructed you to wait on our transporter pad and they will beam you over. It is imperative that the patient survives. There is no indication that he lacks the will or the ability to carry out his threat. If at all possible, you may have the opportunity to evaluate the risk and attempt to weaken his resolve for destruction. Standard kidnapping protocols will apply.”

McCoy pulls a strap of the biggest case over his shoulder and heads for the door, Spock at his heels. 

“What are the odds you get me back by any other means than him getting tired of me and letting me go?”

It is a hollow request for reassurance. “Six thousand fourteen to one,” Spock tells him. As predicted, it seems to lend no comfort. 

McCoy nods, grim, and steps onto the transporter pad. Spock activates his communicator and Uhura patches him through to the Narada. 

“This is the Enterprise. One ready to beam aboard.” 

McCoy begins to dematerialize before the words are completed. 

======

Of all the cockamamie orders Leonard has followed since he signed up with Starfleet, this one takes the cake. 

“’Go to the enemy ship,’ he says. ‘Keep somebody alive or the largest city on Vulcan goes up in flames,’ he says,” Leonard mutters to himself. “Volunteers my ass. Damn pointy-eared…”

He steps on the transporter pad and waits for the bits of him to be ripped apart and scattered across subspace and then put back together again. Feels the other ship grab him by the guts and yank him across the gap between them.

He has a glimpse. Somewhere dark. A man behind a control panel. Shirtless. Battered. Streaked with dark marks that might be blood.

And then he’s in a medical bay, another under-lit, over-warm place. There’s a girl on the biobed that’s in the center, what little light there is pointed at her. Young. Dark haired. Pointed ears. It looks like whoever that was manning the transporter scooped her up with a few inches of decking and some part of a console rather than moving her. Leonard runs the tricorder over her and has to appreciate their caution. Her vertebrae are broken in three places. The spinal cord isn’t cut, but barely. Broken shoulder joint and collar bone. Concussion. Slight internal bleeding from her liver and from the impacts to her limbs and torso that were beyond bruising. 

A little warning is blinking on the side of the tricorder. Species unknown. Hybrid assumed. Shit. He hasn’t been called on to give Mr. Spock any of his medical care, and he has none of that specific data on this tricorder. What little they know of Romulans and their physical deviations from Vulcans may or may not apply to an engineered creature. The sensor estimates her age between nine and eleven years old and Leonard grits his teeth. The one luxury of working for Starfleet, the one reassurance, was the reduced odds that he’d ever have to care for a child again, ever have one die under his hands. 

He hears rushed footsteps behind him. A man bursts into the sickbay, and Leonard takes an instinctive step between him and the patient. He looks like hell, scratched and beaten and bloodied. Skin shining with sweat and gore. He’s barefoot and shirtless and the rigid lines of his face falter as his eyes fall on the child. 

Human, where Nero and all of his visible personnel had been Romulan. What the hell.

“She lives.” The man says it like a statement, like a thing that _must_ be true, if he has to reshape the universe to make it so. His chest heaves and Leonard nods. For all the the guy is young, he seems intense and in charge. He must be the Kirk that Spock had spoke of.

“For now. I need to get her back to the Enterprise. There’s a full medical bay there. She needs care. Equipment. Supplies I don’t have with me.”

Kirk’s jaw clenches, stubborn. Stubborn or terrified. 

“Tell me what you need,” he says, voice hoarse. If Leonard had the time, he’d be looking at the bruises on the man’s throat, the scalp wound that’s streaking fresh red blood down the side of his head. He seems functional and breathing though, which puts the girl as the priority.

“I’d start with some damn light,” Leonard grumbles and the man goes to a console. The light in the room rises steadily until the man is squinting and Leonard can see there are two other occupied beds here. Pike on one, an elderly Vulcan or Romulan on the other, both unconscious. He takes a step towards Pike, to evaluate his condition. 

“No,” the man snaps before Leonard can get to Pike’s side. “Her. You’re here for her. When she’s stable, you can care for them. If she dies, they will join us in her pyre.”

Leonard grits his teeth against the retort that rises up in his throat like bile. 

“For her to live, I need a surgery suite, skeletal and dermal regenerators. Nanobots. White-cell stimulants.”

“Yes,” Kirk agrees. “It is all here.”

Leonard looks around the bay and at a hundred things he wouldn’t recognize without a week of tinkering. He weights how much time he wants to waste arguing with Kirk, how unlikely it is that he’ll let this child he cares about so much out of his sight, how doubtful it is that he’d leave his only bargaining chip to go with her.

“You know what all this stuff is?”

“Yes.” Kirk seems very sure. Leonard takes a breath.

“Okay.” This isn’t ideal. Working in a wholly unfamiliar setting with weird and advanced equipment. 

A three dimensional hologram unfolds over the girl, and Leonard reaches out. The diagram responds intuitively, expanding and enlarging the cranial injuries. _Shit, poor kid,_ he thinks even as he admires the resolution and the data feed. 

“I need to stabilize her spine and then stop the bleeding inside her skull,” he says. 

Kirk makes a sound that the universal translator marks as agreement directed towards a superior. He tinkers behind the console.

“There’s a micro-transporter,” he says. “To remove the excess blood and deliver a coagulant to the injury site.” He hesitates and Leonard looks over to see him quickly scanning a data pad. “It delivers skeletal reinforcement compounds also.”

Leonard’s brain skips a beat. That tech is still years out. A theoretic idea that hasn’t gone to practical trials yet. He couldn’t possibly experiment on a sentient with such a tool.

But. Not much about this place makes sense, and he’s smart enough to see that there are devices at work here so advanced that he has no idea how they function. 

“How precise is it?” he asks.

Kirk looks up. His eyes are very blue against the bruising and carnage spread across his face. 

“Down to the cellular level.”

Okay, looks like they’re doing it his way. Leonard leaves the girl and comes around behind the console. Kirk steps back, keeping Leonard in front of him. Leonard thinks of the hypospray full of sedatives he has in his pack and figures that’s more intelligence on Kirk’s part than paranoia.

Still, Kirk shows him the controls, how to zoom in and how to remove matter from the girl’s gray matter, how to replace it with compounds to stop the bleeding. They go quiet for a while as Leonard works. Half his brain is ticking down the passing of the golden hour to help Pike. He glances to Kirk, wondering if he can step away while the machines run.

“Are your orders to kill me?” Kirk asks, misinterpreting the look. 

Leonard stands straighter. The frankness of the question makes him glance at Kirk, but his eyes are on the child, his face set, determined. 

“That’s not my first choice on how to resolve this, no,” Leonard drawls. “Can’t exactly stand by while you murder millions though.”

Kirk makes a hum in his throat. 

“After she is well, I have one more demand and then I’ll let you.”

Like Leonard is an assassin. Like he’s a killer first instead of a healer. The ship’s Romulan gravity weighs him down, and he feels every moment of the life and death work he’s done in the past day.

Kirk turns his gaze onto Leonard. His blue eyes look tired beyond words. 

“If you try to kill me before she’s well, I’ll kill you. If she dies because I had to kill you, I’ll kill them all.”

It’s been a while since Leonard has had his life in the hands of a person with so little to lose. He wonders who she is to him, how the pair of them got here. He’s young, despite the rigid way he holds himself. 

He snorts. “Thanks for the clarity, I guess.”

The Vulcan stirs. “Jim…” 

Leonard fights the urge to go to the Vulcan’s side. Kirk frowns. Looks down at the controls to see that it’ll be running for a while, and then he nods Leonard over to where the Vulcan is trying to sit up. He doesn’t need a tricorder to see that someone has used the man’s face as a combat dummy. 

“Sir, we need you to lay down and rest. We’ll get medical care to you as soon as possible.” He tries to ease the man down, but he grabs the front of Leonard’s shirt with desperate strength. 

“Leonard. Please.” He gasps for breath as Leonard processes the shock of hearing his name used with such familiarity by a stranger.

“Please. You have to stop him. Help him. He’ll make them kill him. The universe. Any universe will be less than it should be without Jim Kirk in it.”

“Doin’ everything I can to keep everybody alive,” Leonard says, the most honest reassurance he can come up with. 

The machine beeps and Kirk looks over. “Bone-smith,” he calls, and Leonard pries the Vulcan’s fingers from his uniform. 

“I’ll be back as soon as I can with a sedative and pain relief,” he promises. 

He strides over to Kirk, checks the readouts. Goes to the girl’s bedside and double-checks the hologram. 

“It should be safe to move her,” he says, sticking remote monitoring on her to keep track of her vitals when she’s out of the bed. She’s not ready to walk out of here, but everything life-threatening has been stabilized. There are still some things a body needs to work out on its own, and it wouldn’t help for her to wake up crumpled against the hard deck of the ship that she’d been transported to the biobed on.

“There’s nothing to do now but wait,” Leonard says as Kirk comes around the console, as he approaches the bed like he’s afraid it’s all been a trick. He rests his fingertips on her cheek. He’s visibly shaking. He feels for her pulse, feels the breath coming from her parted lips. He looks up long enough to give Leonard a brusque nod towards Captain Pike. Then he slips his arms gently under her, lifts her to his bare chest. Rests her head against his bruised and bloodied shoulder.

Leonard is smart enough to know when to not corner a frightened animal, and he backs off, back to Pike. Kirk takes the child, soft murmurs of “baby baby baby,” on his lips as he rocks her like she’s an infant. Tears glisten in his eyes for the first time. He carries her to the wall near the door, and then it’s like his legs give up and he slides down, curled around her. 

Leonard is sure (pretty sure—not like he has a certain irritating Vulcan here to run the odds for him) that he could walk up with a hypospray and Kirk would let him before he’d risk dropping the child. 

He turns back to Pike’s vitals. Kirk’s clearly not threatening the ship as long as the child is on it.

It’s maybe an hour that Kirk sits with the child,humming softly, tunelessly. Leonard uses the time to stabilize both Pike and the now-unconscious Vulcan elder. Half-Vulcan elder. What the hell. He feels a rush of grudging admiration for the newfangled doodads the Romulans have. Had. He needs to call Spock, but he’s not willing to antagonize Kirk over it. He needs to find out if anybody else is on this ship. 

“Mama.” The voice is so soft he thinks he imagined it, except for the way Kirk’s eyes snap open. 

“Bird. My little Bird. I’m here. I’m here.” His smile is tremulous. Too open for strangers to see.

Leonard winces and tries to focus on Pike’s injuries. The moment is almost too intimate for him to stand it. The word she uses for Kirk. “Mama.” That gives him pause. Not because of Kirk’s gender—there are plenty of ways for a masculine-presenting human to bear a child, but his _age_. He looks mid-twenties at best, and Leonard is pretty sure he’s not that far off in his guess. Jesus, the kid must have been in his early teens for her to be his. It would make it easier to care for her, having a genetic sample of half her lineage, but he still hopes there is some other reason, some other explanation.

He cares for the two patients until there’s nothing but busy work left. Waiting for their bodies to get over the shock of physical and emotional damage. 

“Hey,” he calls, as gentle as he can make his voice. Her readout says she’s sleeping, slight blips in her heartbeat as it rises and falls with distressed dreaming.

Kirk looks up, warning in his eyes.

“I should probably contact my ship before Spock decides to do something ‘smart’.”

Kirk looks back down to the kid. His jaw works and then he nods. “It’s almost over,” he says, and Leonard isn’t sure if he’s talking to him, her or himself. He tries to push himself up, leveraging a leg against the floor and his back against the wall. He makes it halfway to upright and then sinks back a few inches.

“I can hold her,” Leonard offers. 

Kirk glares at him. 

Leonard frowns back. “I would die before I would harm a patient or use one as a hostage. You won’t crash this ship while she’s still breathin’, and that’s the only thing that might sway my Hippocratic oath.”

Kirk looks down. 

“You’d rather drop her?” It’s playing dirty, but this needs to end. He had been serious about the threat of Spock staging an attack of some sort. Better to get it all over with before more pieces are put on the board. 

Kirk gives a jut of his chin and shifts her in his arms and Leonard comes up slow, crouches down and slides his arms in alongside Kirk’s. His skin is cool against Leonard’s. Clammy. His pupils decidedly _not_ equal and responsive. His face is so pale it looks like he’s got more blood on the outside of him than the inside. Leonard could have just waited. Stalled until Kirk succumbed to his injuries. 

“Bird,” Kirk says. “Her name is Bird.”

“Bird,” Leonard agrees. “Where’d you get a name like that in a place like this? You ever even _seen_ a bird?”

Kirk’s lips quirk in a sad smile. Leonard leans back and lifts. Jesus, he forgot the Romulan gravity as the strain of operating in it bled into the usual exhaustion of unbroken hours of work. 

“There was a song,” Kirk says as he struggles to his feet. He leans against the wall and takes a few shallow breaths. His hand presses to his abdomen, underneath his navel but Leonard doesn’t think it looks like a gesture of physical pain. “There was a song, about three little birds. I remember. I remember my mama singing it.” He reaches out like he wants to touch her hair again but stops himself.

“She was the third. The third little bird they put inside me.” He nods Leonard to the door and he takes the cue. Starts walking, Kirk shuffling along on sheer willpower beside him. 

“The others died,” Kirk says, and the grief in his voice is so heavy, so real. “Every little thing. ‘S gonna be alright,” he murmurs, and if they don’t get where they’re going soon, Leonard’s going to have to figure out how to disarm the ship’s shields on his own, and he wouldn’t put much money on his chances of that. As heavy as Bird is to him, he doesn’t think he could possibly get Kirk through the ship without him walking.

“You said your mom,” Leonard prompts. Keeping him talking, keeping him conscious. “She still on board?”

Kirk shakes his head, and for a second Leonard thinks he underestimated Kirk’s hunger for conversation or overestimated his stamina. 

“She died. Nero spaced her. I was too little then. I couldn’t stop him. Not yet.”

They turn a corner and step into the bridge. Leonard’s shoes make a sticky sound on the floor, the copper scent of Romulan blood filling his sinuses. Nero, nearly-decapitated, watches over from his chair. 

“You don’t do things halfway, do you?” he asks. 

Kirk makes it to a console and the hailing signal chirps into the quiet of the room. He makes grabby hands towards Bird and Leonard passes her over despite his serious concerns that Kirk won’t be able to hold her. 

Leonard expects Kirk to start the conversation as Spock appears on the screen in front of them, but he gives Leonard another of those impatient nods. 

“CMO Leonard McCoy reporting on the situation onboard the Narada,” he says. 

“Go ahead, McCoy, we’re reading you,” Uhura assures him. 

“I am alive and unharmed,” he says, because it speaks of Kirk’s disposition and honesty. “I have provided medical care to a child known as ‘Bird’ and been allowed to stabilize Captain Pike and a Vulcan of unknown identity.” He falters then, not sure what else anybody needs to hear. 

“I have one more demand,” Kirk’s voice cuts in as he steps into the line of sight. “One more thing you must do and then I will surrender this ship and myself unconditionally.”

“We are ready to hear your request,” Spock says, fingers templed in front of him. 

Kirk’s back is to him, and Leonard thinks he could end this. A single punch to the kidneys and Kirk would crumple, he’s pretty sure of it. He waits instead. To hear if the demand is within Spock’s ability and willingness to obey.

“She must be recognized,” Kirk says, staring Spock down like he’s not a hair’s breath from collapse. He takes a breath. “She is Bird. Flesh of my body, born in my blood. Say it.”

Spock hesitates, and Leonard has a heart-stopping moment that he’ll ask for the genetic sequencing before he’ll agree to something so unlikely, but then nods. “She is your child.” 

Kirk nods. Swallows hard. “I am James Tiberius Kirk. I am flesh of Winona Kirk of the USS Kelvin, born in her blood. Say it.”

Spock blinks, glances over to where Leonard assumes someone is frantically researching the matter. 

“You are the child of Winona Kirk and George Kirk,” Spock agrees. 

Kirk sags a little, relief or exhaustion, Leonard can’t tell which. 

“My child is the grandchild of Federation officers,” Kirk says, and Leonard can finally see where he’s going, and his heart breaks. Oh stupid kid, he’s fighting for what they would have given her freely. 

“She will receive the rights, care, and protection due to a citizen of the Federation and of Earth. Say it.”

Spock nods, his eyes particularly solemn, even for him. 

“She will be cared for. I swear this.”

Kirk licks his lips. 

“She is innocent of my crimes. Of her father’s crimes.”

Leonard sees what he did. Naming himself and whoever her other genetic donor is as if they are one person. There doesn’t seem much point in slowing things down by mentioning that.

“Of course,” Spock says.

Kirk nods, presses his face to Bird’s hair one last time and then he shifts, offers her out to Leonard. Leonard takes her and then steps back when Kirk shoos him away.

“Then I am done. I offer my complete surrender.” He touches a panel and nothing in the room changes for long seconds and then the air fills with the hum of transporters. Security officers in their blood red uniforms materialize around them, rifles coming up as soon as they orient themselves, pointing at Kirk. 

It’s carefully controlled chaos then, one screaming “Hands behind your head! Hands behind your head!” 

Kirk steps back from the console, hands coming up to obey. He’s no sooner got his hands up than they’re on him, grabbing him, kicking the feet out from under him. He lands heavy and Leonard loses sight of him. 

He hits his communicator. “Two to beam directly to sickbay,” he says, because Bird doesn’t need to see this. Because it’s near-gutting him to be here and unable to help.


	2. Chapter 2

In Leonard’s defense, the sickbay is just as chaotic when he gets there as it had been when he left. Different patients, some of the medical staff cycled through to rest. They haven’t worked together as a team for long enough for him to know who should be there that isn’t. He hears later that they’d beamed survivors from other ships over, and some of the staff weren’t even assigned to the Enterprise.

Pike and the Vulcan are beamed in from the Narada and the order comes from an unfamiliar voice the bridge that they are to prepare the most-injured crew members for transport to hospitals on Vulcan. 

“Not him, not her,” Leonard says as staff starts determining who are the priority patients. He wants the Vulcan who knew his name and Bird kept close at hand. Her because the person Leonard is considering her custodial parent is on board and him because something about that conversation on the ship was so fishy it has gills. Pike…well, not Pike, but whoever ends up sorting through this mess for answers will want to talk to him sooner or later.

It finally quiets down after that, triage down to surface injuries and minor mishaps as repairs are made on the ship, people who need to be patched up and sent back to the very important work of making sure this tin can keeps floating and keeping air inside it. In the quiet, Leonard looks around, something nagging at his thoughts, some detail he’s missed.

“Who went down to the brig to evaluate Kirk’s condition?” he asks into the room. 

Blank faces look up at him. 

“Who?” one of the junior doctors asks.

“Who?” Leonard snaps. “Who? The prisoner they brought back from the Narada! The…”

Shit. The injured man who has been sitting in a cell for over an hour with serious injuries. 

“Damn it!” he swears and grabs some additional supplies he might need and the standard first-aid kit, stuffing it full as he heads for the door.

“Security never put in a request for medical assistance,” the ensign who tracks incoming patients says. 

“They damn well should have!” 

For all that he’s furious with security, he’s furious at himself too. _He_ knew Kirk was there. _He_ knew the man was seriously injured. 

Damn it!

He steps out into the corridor and even in his rush the sight makes him falter. He’d beamed directly to sick bay, and that’s been as busy as any emergency room he’s ever worked in. He thought. He expected the rest of the Enterprise to be the same, a buzzing hive of activity.

The corridor is empty, twenty or thirty meters in either direction until it curved with the flowing lines of the ship. There’s nobody. Nobody at all.

He turns and jogs towards the turbolift, and there’s someone in there as he steps in, wearing engineering red. 

“Where the hell is everybody?” he asks, waves of dread swirling in his guts.

The crewman watches the sections roll by on the readout, like a racehorse at the gate, like zir mission is of urgent priority.

“Spock took what was left of Alpha shift to secure the enemy ship. Beta is taking a half-shift rest. Gamma is spread thin covering all sections and making repairs.”

The doors open and the crewman turns zir shoulders sideways to slip through even faster than the doors would allow and then they’re gone. 

Leonard rocks on his toes and watches the floors fly past and when they get to the security wing he’s out the door almost as fast as the crewman had been. 

He bursts into the brig and the two guards behind the desk snap up in defensive postures, deflating a bit when they see his uniform and medical bag. 

“Finally,” one of them says. “He’s not looking so good.”

“Then why didn’t you call for medical?” Leonard snaps. They’re both ridiculously young, so green they smell like grass. He doesn’t wait to hear what incompetence has resulted in this fuckup, already heading past them towards the cells. Only one is occupied and the bars shimmer out before he can reach it. 

Kirk is laying on the padded ledge that’s both bed and bench, his back to the room. A bruise wider than Leonard’s hand spans his back. He’s paler than he had been on the Narada, the green and red of blood on his skin obscenely dark. He’s got one arm wrapped around his face, is eyes pressed into the elbow and the other curled protectively over his ribs. The least-filthy strands of his hair seem light-brown or dark-blond, and he’s wearing pants of some kind of synthetic material, matte black, stark against the pasty skin of his back.

His feet are bare, pale soles ringed with an edge of dark green where he’d tracked through the blood of dead Romulans. 

Leonard can see him shaking from the edge of the cell, and when he gets closer, he can hear broken humming, little two and three note strings of sound as Kirk self-soothes. 

“Lights, seventy percent. Heat, twenty nine degrees.” He snaps open a heating blanket and turns it on, drapes it over Kirk’s body.

The man flinches violently, turning Leonard’s way, squinting against even the dimmer light. His hands twitch up defensively but he’d have a hard time fighting off a kitten right now, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. . 

“Don’t…don’t…” Kirk whispers. His eyes are unfocused and Leonard isn’t sure he can even see him with the overhead lights behind Leonard’s head. 

“It’s Doctor McCoy,” Leonard says, even though he’s not sure he introduced himself the first time they met. “I’m here to take care of your injuries. You’re safe here.”

Kirk swallows hard, his breath unsteady. “Bonesm’” he murmurs, and if there’s a title Leonard hates, Bone-smith is it. Like a body is just a weapon, like his duty is honing an edge not healing a person.

“Kirk,” he starts. The Vulcan had called him something else so he tries that. “Jim. James. You’re injured. You require medical care.”

If the man would either focus or pass out already, Leonard’s job would be a lot easier. 

“Kirk, do you consent to medical treatment?” 

Something goes looser in the lines of Kirk’s body, a sudden understanding giving him some level of ease.

“I consent to everything,” he says. “I surrender. I surrender unconditionally.”

It’s like the kid is trying to break Leonard’s heart on purpose. What the hell do you say to that?

He gives the tricorder a sweep over Kirk’s body but it doesn’t have any ugly surprises. He loads a hypospray up with a mild sedative, an analgesic, broad spectrum antibiotics and a hit of vitamins that Kirk appears chronically deficient. He adds a compound to keep the concussion from developing into encephalopathy and injects the whole mess into Kirk’s system.

Kirk melts, the draining tension leaving him nearly limp, and Leonard wonders when the last time he slept was, the last time he rested without fear. 

He hooks up an IV line for fluids, saline and glucose. Offers him a tube of water to wash his mouth out with. 

Kirk’s core temperature slowly rises and Leonard does another, more careful examination. He’d been mildly curious that in all of the violence Kirk doesn’t appear to have broken a single bone, but the tricorder shows him that his skeletal structure is denser than humans raised in Earth-standard gravity. A history of breaks, but nothing recent. He’s whipcord lean, and Leonard will be glad to see another eight to ten kilograms of weight put onto him, preferably fat. 

The abdominal scan comes up with an anomaly. An engineered organ in his lower torso, human and Romulan DNA. A closed-system womb. No outside access. No ovaries. Hard to tell if he’d carried a fetus to term, with the Romulan’s fancy tech to patch him up after the surgical extraction, but his claim of bearing and birthing Bird from his body seems likely. Jesus, Kirk must have been barely a teenager. Leonard would pay good money to have whoever did that to a child, a god-damn child, in front of him. His Hippocratic oath would understand him doing some harm, just this once. 

“Bird,” Kirk whispers. “Did they. Is she…”

“She’s safe. Sleeping when I left her a few minutes ago. There are good doctors with her if anything changes.”

Kirk makes a noise of acceptance and closes his eyes. Leonard pulls out the regenerator and fires it up. It’s gonna be a long job, getting all of Kirk’s bruises and broken skin healed. 

“Look,” Leonard says, feeling the need to do more help than just put Kirk’s body back together. “I’m guessing nobody had the time to tell you your rights before they dumped you here and ran off.”

Kirk opens his eyes enough to squint at Leonard. When he leaves, he’ll set the lights lower, but for now he needs to be able to work.

Leonard starts with the cut along his hairline, still bleeding sluggishly and begins the regen. 

“You have the right to medical care. If you tell the guards you need attention, a member of the medical staff _must_ be called. If I can’t get here, I’ll make sure the person who comes is one I trust. If nobody comes in a few minutes, you tell the guards again, because things are a little outside of their training right now.”

He moves slow, but Kirk doesn’t flinch back from his touch, doesn’t fight when Leonard’s gloved fingertips pinch the wound closed and he starts sealing it. 

“You have the right to an attorney. A law-smith, whatever you want to call it, if you’re being questioned. I’m not sure if you’ll be charged with some crime, or what, but don’t answer questions alone.”

He finishes up the head-wound and moves to the bruising over Kirk’s larynx. 

“They can’t hurt you in order to force compliance. Nobody can strike you or starve you or injure you in any way.”

“Bird,” Kirk asks, his gaze resting Leonard’s face.

“She has the same rights. She can’t be punished for anything you or…any other genetic donor has done or will do. You could kill me right now, and she wouldn’t be punished for it.” 

“No,” Kirk says, soft. “No more killing. Done today. I’m done forever.”

“Glad to hear it,” Leonard says.

He works his way down a scrape on Kirk’s shoulder, a bruise on his elbow. Kirk rolls his wrist so Leonard can get at his busted knuckles. 

He lifts Kirk’s hand in his, and his fingertips curl a little around Leonard’s.

“You want to talk about it?” 

“Don’t I need a lawyer?”

Leonard snorts. “Doctor-patient confidentiality. Even the security feeds are under medical lock unless a crime is committed.”

Kirk’s lips quirk, the closest thing Leonard has seen to a smile.

“Wait, was that a joke?”

Kirk shrugs, and the flicker of mirth fades again. It doesn’t seem he’ll answer the question. He must have no tolerance for the drugs Leonard gave him at all, because he looks dopey, relaxed, staring at Leonard as Leonard works. 

“What do you see?” Leonard asks, because “what are you looking at” always comes off rude. He’s _capable_ of bedside manners, when he’s not dealing with some dumbass who doesn’t deserve the effort. 

“You’re the first. Human, I mean.”

Leonard frowns. 

“You mentioned your parents…”

“My father died the day I was born,” Kirk says, the statement kind of hollow, a fact and not a cornerstone of his emotional self. 

“Mama…Nero killed her. I remember the sound of her voice. The color of her hair. Not her face, though.” Melancholy more than the sharpness of fresh grief. There’s a scar between his mouth and chin, more noticeable when he talks. Just another marker of neglect or abuse, that he’d been left to heal the slow way when the technology to prevent it had been so close at hand.

His free hand slips out from under the blanket and reaches up, slow enough that Leonard can stop him, can intercept him with the hand holding the regenerator before he touches Leonard’s face.

“It’s not considered polite to touch a person without their permission.” He says it mild, but Kirk listens all the same. He doesn’t pull his hand back though.

“Do you consent?” Kirk asks, and it hits Leonard then, that this isn’t so much ‘comforting a traumatized patient’ and sure as hell not ‘interacting with a hostile prisoner’. For all that Kirk is a human-shaped person, this may as well be a first contact for all he knows of human customs.

“I do,” Leonard says, willing to risk a little of his personal space to satisfy his curiosity over what Kirk will do with the permission. 

He moves the regenerator and goes back to work on Kirk’s other hand, steeling him not to flinch unless it seems Kirk is _intending_ to hurt him. 

He’s not expecting the touch to be so light, Kirk’s fingers dancing along his cheek. Up to his temple, thumb stroking his eyebrow. It aches, how gentle it is, how long it’s been since Leonard was touched like this—he’s had plenty of sex since the divorce, but it had always been casual, never a partner he shared such…tenderness with. 

“That’s enough,” Leonard murmurs, when the temptation to lean into the touch becomes too much, and Kirk obediently withdraws. Just as well, since Leonard still needs to get that arm and hand.

Leonard’s communicator chirps and Kirk has a full-body twitch at the sudden sound, eyes snapping wide. 

Leonard makes a soothing gesture with one hand while he taps his chest with the other. 

“McCoy, you’re needed back in sickbay.” One of the nurses, Chapel, Leonard thinks. She sounds stressed but professional. 

“On my way,” Leonard says and then taps it back off. He eases the IV out of Kirk’s arm and then regens the small puncture. Suppresses a sigh at a job half-done, but there is nothing left that’s critical.

“The hypo I gave you should make it easier to sleep,” he tells Kirk. “Get some rest, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you feel worse in any way, tell the guards and I’ll get someone here quicker than that.”

Kirk’s head moves in a way that Leonard interprets as a nod so he packs his gear and heads back to sickbay, past the numb-nuts at the security desk, through the silent corridors—or silent until he gets to the one outside sickbay.

“Where! Is! Mama!” a furious little voice screams and Leonard jogs the last few meters to the door. Shit.


	3. Bird in a strange land

“Where! Is! Mama!”

Leonard thanks his lucky stars that Kirk hadn’t heard _that_ when Chapel called. He steps through the door into his own sickbay and the chaos has returned, staff moving patients to one side of the room while in the other, Bird is awake, standing and angry and _armed_. Her dark hair is coming out of the braid that holds it back. Her eyes water—whether it’s from sorrow or the uncomfortably bright lights, Leonard doesn’t know. 

“Doctor!” someone says as he comes in, but he waves them off, puts his best dad-smile on, eases a little closer. 

“Bird,” he calls, soft, and she turns his way. There’s a find tremble to her chin. Alone for probably the first time in her life, surrounded by strangers and in a physically hostile environment. 

Her hand on the phaser is rock steady though. He can’t see if it’s set to stun. He is going to _ruin_ whoever let her get her hands on that. 

He reaches blind and grabs a chair, sits himself down so he’s at her level. 

“Bird, I know you’re scared, but I talked to your Mama just a minute ago. I was with him when they called me to come up here.”

Her attention and her weapon lock onto him. “You will take me to him.”

There’s a shuffle behind him, booted steps coming into the room together. He turns his head for just a second to see a wall of red and then turns back to Bird.

“That child had a major spinal and cranial injury earlier today,” he says, his tone still soft, still pitched not to frighten an already terrified patient. “Even a stun could kill her. I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out of my sickbay now.”

“You heard the man,” a voice says behind him, rough but no less authoritative for that. Good to know Pike is conscious and coherent and shouldering some blame if this all goes to shit.

“Christine, I need you to get a bowl of soup from the replicator. Broth #12 is a good choice, and bring it down to Kirk in the brig. See if he’d like to record a message for Bird.”

“Are you sure we have time for that?”

The phaser turns towards Chapel’s voice and Leonard moves his hand to reclaim her attention.

“Hey Bird, stay with me hon, okay?” He’d much rather gamble with his own life than one of his staff.

Bird aims at him again, and that’s good, that’s fine. “Go on, Christine. Bird’s gonna stay here with me until she hears from her mama, right?”

Bird purses her lips in a way that would be adorable if she didn’t have a deadly weapon pointed at him. After a second’s thought, she nods. 

The replicator runs and then the door opens and closes. Bird tracks the movements but doesn’t change where she’s aiming that thing. 

“I don’t think you want to hurt anybody, do you, Bird?” 

An equally slow-coming shake of her head is his only answer. He just needs to keep her attention, keep her engaged until Chapel comes back, hopefully with a vid. 

“Good, I’m real glad to hear that. You know I don’t think I’ve ever been held hostage by a fa—a mama and child in the same day before. This has to be a record for me. Two Kirks in one day.”

“Why. Why did mama hold you?” 

Leonard smiles softly. “He was scared for you. You needed a bone-smith and he didn’t know a better way to get one. It worked out okay though. He didn’t hurt me and you’re much better now.”

She cocks her head, and Kirk might not know a bird from a Jabberwocky, but he didn’t do too bad with the name.

“We were—the Federation, Starfleet, Mama was fighting for them. Killing for them. They were supposed to be grateful. They were supposed to be kind. Why is he held now? Where is he?”

“Not my choice kid. Things are a mess right now, so it probably doesn’t hurt anything that he’s somewhere safe and controlled. Less chance for something to go wrong, and we’ll get it all straightened out soon.” 

“Take me there,” she orders with all the command of a starship captain. 

“That’s not my choice either,” Leonard says. “But Chapel’s gonna bring you a vid and we’ll watch it together, okay?” 

There’s a second where he thinks she might shoot him and walk over his corpse in search of Kirk, but she shifts back instead, lowers the front of the phaser another few inches. It doesn’t weight much, but she’s gotta be weak and tired after being half-dead a few hours ago. 

“Nero?” 

He wasn’t quite ready for that one. Isn’t quite sure what answer she’d like to hear.

“He’s dead,” Leonard says, keeping his voice neutral.

She nods. Seems to find satisfaction in the news. “I thought. If Mama’s alive then Nero isn’t.”

If Leonard had answered otherwise, she’d know Kirk was dead and everybody was lying to her. Clever little shit.

She’s leaning heavier against the wall at her back, elbows tucked in at her sides and the phaser only vaguely pointed at him anymore. She perks up when Chapel comes back.

“Hey hey, stay with me, sweetheart,” Leonard calls when the phaser drifts Chapel’s way. “Stay with me, good, good.” He holds his hand out blind behind him, trusting Chapel wouldn’t be back without something to help them. She puts a data-stick in his hand and he rolls his chair slowly across to the holoscreen closest to Bird. 

It takes a second to load up, and then Kirk is there on the screen, looking confused but willing. “Bird? Baby?” he looks to the side, uncertain, and Chapel must have nodded to him because he turns back to the recorder. 

“I know. This isn’t what we thought it would be. I thought…we’d be together. But it’ll be okay. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. It might be a long time, so until then listen. Watch. Learn. _Survive_. Trust…trust Bones. He’ll take care of you. I know you were following orders, to get a weapon, but that order was for a different place. They don’t want to hurt you but things go wrong when there’s a weapon.” It sounds like he’s parroting something Chapel said, but Bird is still listening. Too much canned speech and she’ll reject it though. 

“Wait for me. Be strong.” Kirk’s chin trembles and he’s holding himself together by a thread. “I love you,” he says, and then waves for Chapel to stop the recording, his hand raising to wipe tears away as the vid ends. 

A mirror of Kirk’s tears run down Bird’s cheeks and she scrubs her face against her shoulder to wipe them away. 

“Who…who’s Bones?” she asks, her voice thick. 

“Me,” Leonard says. 

She takes a trembling breath and puts the safety on the phaser, holds it out. He moves closer, reaches and takes it. She reaches into her belt and passes him a god-damn laser scalpel too, not making eye contact, and then she crumples, arms around herself, sobbing silently. 

“I know, kid,” Leonard murmurs, hand reaching out to her shoulder. She’s not that much older than Joanna was the last time he saw her.

Bird flinches from the touch, twisting and striking out, her eyes wide, angry and so so afraid. Her fist is small and strong and fast as hell as she snaps a punch into his fore arm. 

He grunts and steps back quick to give her space. He goes numb from elbow to fingertips. He’s not sure if she meant to hit a nerve, literally, but he’s not a fan of the feeling.

“I’m sorry,” he says, sincere. “No touching. Got it.”

“McCoy,” Pike calls, and yeah, giving the kid some time to process seems like an awesome idea. 

“Yeah, Captain?” he asks as he backs away, shakes out his hand. She gave up the weapons. It should be okay to turn his back on her now, but it doesn’t feel exactly safe.

“How are you feeling?” 

Pike is pale, his hand clammy when Leonard takes it. He doesn’t look bad for a man who had a god-damn _insect_ latched onto his brain-stem a few hours ago. He’s not trying to sit up though, holding himself very stiff, like he’s in pain despite the quality and quantity of drugs in his system.

“Who was that?” He manages a slight nod towards the holoscreen.

“Kirk,” Leonard answers. “He claims to be the child of Starfleet officers, lost when Nero destroyed their ship. The Kelvin, I think.”

“George,” Pike breathes, “And Winona. They. She was pregnant. I remember. I haven’t thought about them in years. I never dreamed their child could be alive.”

Leonard hums. “Looks like he killed Nero. He surrendered the Narada, after some tense negotiating.”

“He killed them _all_ ,” Bird hisses. “Eleven, all of them that were left, since Spock came, since Nero stopped waiting.”

“What?” Leonard says, at the same time Pike asks “Spock?”

She nods over at the Vulcan on the bed on the far side of the room, his wrinkled face beaten and bruised, his eyes closed still. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” Pike mutters. 

Leonard would really like the world to make more sense right about now. That explains how a Vulcan/Human hybrid that is so much older than the first known successful birth exists, but not what the hell he’s doing in stardate 2258.

“Time travel?” Pike confirms, and Bird huffs like he’s the stupidest life form to ever process a thought. 

“It would explain the level of their technology. If the modern Romulan Empire was all that advanced, the Federation would have fallen years ago,” Leonard says, thinking of the sickbay over there. 

“Why is Kirk in the brig?” Pike asks.

Leonard rubs his hand over his face. “Let’s just say his negotiating style was too much like Nero’s. My guess is there was nobody of high enough rank to question him. I’m pretty sure Spock is over there right now.”

Pike makes an unhappy hum and closes his eyes. 

“You need to get some rest,” Leonard tells him, and Pike grunts.

“I’m gonna give you something to make it easier,” Leonard says, and pulls up a mild sedative. 

Pike is down, old-Spock is still unconscious. Bird is watching everyone and everything like she’d prefer to start slitting throats. Shit.

“Baker, is there a clean cot you can set up in my office? Food, blankets and fresh clothing too.” He’d prefer to set her up in her own quarters but can’t risk her running around unsupervised. 

He waits until it’s all moved in and then nods Bird over. She moves like she expects to be shot in the back, but she goes, wraps herself in a blanket and huddles against the wall. She ignores the silverware and grabs the plate, brings it under the blanket with her, eating the food with her hands. 

“You’re safe here,” Leonard says, soft. “Try to get some rest. Your Mama is safe where he is too. Do you want the vid playing here?”

She nods so he takes the time to move it over himself, giving her what privacy he can taking what he needs from the office to work on in the main room. Not like it’s been his office for more than a day—he’s not particularly attached. 

“Bird? Baby?” Kirk’s voice says from the holoscreen. Leonard closes the door behind him as he goes.

And then there’s nothing left that he can do but the paperwork. He writes up the security team downstairs for not calling for medical when Kirk was brought in, the person who’s phaser Bird got hold of for not relinquishing it when they entered sickbay with a broken ankle, and the nurse who hadn’t checked for a weapon or put it in the locker as required. He’s not sure how Bird got the laser scalpel but he makes note of it in his file, to research and prevent another such occurrence in the future. 

He finishes up and stretches at the small desk he’s using. He wonders what’s happening over on the Narada. If Kirk had killed all the Romulans like Bird said, or if there is the potential for further casualties in the stupid bloody conflict. 

He rests his head on his folded hands, just for a minute, remembering the blue of Kirk’s eyes.


	4. Interrogation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I...had not intended Jim to be a POV character, but apparently he had a different opinion on that than I did...

Kirk gives his words to the recorder, for the woman Chapel to take back to Bird. Words. All he can give to his child. He wipes his face and lays back on the shelf. He is done, he is done. There are no more enemies to fight, no more demands to make. For all that Bones said Bird would not be punished for his actions, he cannot risk it going forward. 

His body aches behind the soft swaddle of medication. His head hurts and his eyelids are heavy. The thrum of this ship’s engine is so different than the one he knows, the sounds of it so new that he can’t stop hearing them. 

He surrenders to sleep like he has surrendered to the Spock who sat on the Enterprise’s bridge, young and sharp in a way that is hard to see echoed in his older self. 

Kirk surrenders. Kirk sleeps. His fingers twitch in the cool air, his heartbeat kicking up again and again as he reaches for Bird and doesn’t find her. 

He wakes to the guards coming into his cell. Four of them, two armed and standing back, two empty handed, reaching for him. He startles, pulls himself against the wall at his back and they stop.

“James Tiberius Kirk, you’re wanted for questioning.”

They wait, and he slowly uncurls himself, rises to his full height. The floor is cool against his bare feet. He expects to be taken to the bridge, to be put on his knees at Spock’s feet, but they take him to a tiny room with a smaller cubical. 

“Sonic,” one of the guards says. “You’ve used one before?” 

He has, but not one like this. He strips off the last of his clothing. Two of the guards leave. One watches as the other shows him the controls. He can’t feel the sound waves, but the filth on his skin flakes and falls away, bits of blood and Romulan brains falling from his hair, tickling down his back and thighs. He rubs his hands over himself, lifts his arms and rolls his neck so the sonic can get everywhere. 

The guards wait, seemingly patient, but Kirk can think of no benefit to himself in delaying, in risking the impatience of his captors. He turns the sonic off and steps out of the booth and the guards hand him a stack of soft clothing, pale bright colors like he’s never seen before. He unfolds the cloth, figures out which part is the shirt, loose and floppy and too thin to keep him warm or stop a blow. The pants are the same, and then the guards pass him a pair of shoes for his feet, just a thin sole with a strip of cloth that goes over the arch of his foot. 

They cloak him in humility, dress him in meekness. He’s already given all the surrender he can, and allows this indignity to pass without protest. He has no honor left to guard, no pride to protect.

He nods when he’s dressed and ready. The guards clip shackles around his wrists and then lead him out, two in front, two behind. They are attentive, careful. He’s still sure that, given a reason to, he could incapacitate the one on his left rear, take his weapon and be free of them in minutes.

He could be free, but he walks quietly between them, head down, his slippered feet shuffling against the glossy surface of the floor.

Nero would have had him taken to the bridge, but the guards lead through less ostentatious corridors to a small room with an oval table, eight chairs, a vid screen of some kind on the wall.

Spock is there, and Pike in a large chair that supports him in a reclining position. Bones, meeting Kirk’s eye but not smiling. A woman on the other side of the table is the only person he does not know.

The guard unfastens his wrists and she stands to greet him, offering her hand. He touches fingertips, not sure what she’s wanting from him, what’s right. “Leena Forester. I’m here as your legal representation. There are no formal charges against you at this time, but I’ll be here to witness the debriefing and to advise you of your rights should new data emerge. This is Acting-Captain S'chn T'gai Spock, Captain Christopher Pike, and I believe you’ve already met Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy—he’s here to monitor Captain Pike’s health.

Kirk looks around, takes in their faces. The table seems…insufficient for interrogation. No straps to hold him down, no tools of torture. He had had no choice but to assume McCoy was telling the truth, but there is some relief in seeing an indication that he was right to do so.

Forester gestures him to an empty chair and he sits. Two of the security team take their places beside the door, standing at rest.

“Please state your name for the record,” Spock says, too mild to be an order but Kirk knows of no other way to take it. 

“I am James Tiberius Kirk, flesh of Winona Kirk of the USS Kelvin, born in her blood.” 

“So you have said,” Spock answers. “Why do you believe this is true?”

Kirk frowns. Glances to Bones, but Bones is checking something on his medical device and does not raise his eyes to meet Kirk’s.

The question is like being asked why the universe exists. It just does. “It is what she said.” 

“Kirk,” Pike cuts in, his tone gentle. It makes the hairs on the back of Kirk’s neck stand up. “Jim. How long were you on the Narada?”

“Since the destruction of the Kelvin.”

“And your mother…we found no evidence of any survivors besides yourself and Bird. Did she. Is she…”

Kirk frowns, unsure why a truth comes so hard from Pike’s lips. He glances up and away again. The eye contact, Pike and Spock, he finds it oppressive. Tiring to maintain.

“Nero killed her. Four point one five earth standard years after the Kelvin, by his log.”

“What was your relationship with Nero that you were privy to his personal recordings,” Spock interjects, his tone even, his words quick and clipped. 

“I was forever his enemy,” Kirk answers. “I broke the code and hacked his recordings. The schematics, everything. I’ve seen into the living heart of the Narada. Once, I was days away from being able to detonate the warp cores.”

“’Once,’ so this was not a recent event.” Spock says it as a statement.

“No,” Kirk agrees. He breathes slow and even, his foot twitching in his slipper as he remembers the feel of Romulan hands around his ankle, dragging him out of an access tube, the sting of ripped fingernails as he clawed at the seams in the smooth metal, trying to get away from them. 

“I thought they knew what I’d been working on. I thought they would kill me, or maybe just keep me in a cell. But they’d found a bone-smith, and they gave me Bird, and I couldn’t blow the ship then. I had to wait. For her to be big enough to live alone in the ship if they killed me. I got bigger. Stronger. And then I started killing them. Or making them kill each other. Changing data, moving prized possessions. I couldn’t. Couldn’t kill them all at first, and if they tried, they could have caught me. Caught her. If they knew it was me making them die.”

Bones mutters under his breath, shaking his head.

“What changed?” Pike asks.

“Spock. Nero’s Spock. He came through the time distortion with the ship carrying the red matter, and all of Nero’s plans, all the things he’d been talking about for years, he was going to make them come true. The destruction of Vulcan, and Earth. I’d been thinning the ranks but I was out of time. I killed as many as I could without risking contact. Things I had planned ahead for the final days. Closing off sections and venting atmosphere. Rewiring consoles. The rest I fought.”

“When did it become _necessary_ to threaten the lives of one point three billion Vulcans?”

Kirk’s not imagining the sharp edge to Spock’s question.

He stares at the edge of the table. “Bird was hurt. Dying. Nero’s methods had forced two starship captains to surrender their own lives into his hands. It seemed. Expedient.”

Bones snorts. “Damn stupid kid.” His mutter loud enough to be understood this time.

“Would you have done it?” 

Forester’s hand reaches out, rests on Kirk’s forearm. 

“You shouldn’t answer that.”

Even with the few mentions of Federation law that were in the Narada’s data banks, he can tell that this is the line across which lies a very long prison sentence. He just doesn’t care. He can see no other future.

“I couldn’t pilot the ship alone. I couldn’t unlock it from the stationary orbit without a co-pilot.”

“Son of a bitch,” Bones hisses and Kirk glances up. The bone-smith doesn’t seem angry though. Seems grudgingly admiring. 

“You lied.” Spock sounds vaguely surprised. 

A low whistle breaks in. 

“Bridge to Captain Spock,” the woman’s voice says, the same one Kirk had heard when he contacted the Enterprise. “A listening post near the Romulan neutral zone has intercepted a sub-space transmission. It is intended for the Narada. They are demanding Nero’s submission to the authority of the Empire. He is ordered to hold position until the Romulan fleet can arrive.”

“Shit!” Pike hisses. 

“No,” Kirk whispers. Finds himself on his feet with no memory of standing up. The two guards step in on either side of him, Forester moving out of their way.

Only Spock is still, his body unmoving as his eyes flick around in thought, sorting options like they were screens in front of him. 

“You can destroy the Narada,” he says, and Kirk thinks he’ll vomit, thinks this is a nightmare. 

“No. No, I won’t. You _can’t_!”

“A ship that is so far beyond current technology cannot be allowed to fall into Romulan hands.”

“That ship has red matter on it! Enough to destroy a hundred words! You can’t…”

“It is capable of warp, yes?”

“Yes! No! That’s a terrible idea. They are Romulans. What are they going to do when they get here, the Narada is gone and half Starfleet is in pieces around a naked planet.”

“The fleet is on their way back from the Laurentian system,” Pike says, and Kirk pauses. He hadn’t known that. That there were more, that Nero hadn’t destroyed them all before Kirk could kill him. 

“Yeah, but who’ll get here first? And are there enough left to stop the Romulans?” Bones adds his voice to the argument. 

Spock stands, straightens his uniform.

Kirk reaches for him, to stop him, to make him listen.

The guards grab him, one on either side. He could fight them. He could win, but he doesn’t know how to do that and to make himself heard. This fighting with words is a battle he’s unprepared for.

“You have to fight! You have to fight. They’re Romulan; there’s no way to stop them without fighting them!” 

Bird, oh Bird, what will they do to her if they find her, if they take the Enterprise whole. How will she die if they don’t—blown apart or gasping at vacuum like his mama. 

He snaps an elbow up into the face of the guard on the left, drags the other one forward as he grabs onto Spock’s arm, sees Spock’s other hand pulling back for a blow that he won’t be able to stop. The guard he struck has recovered, the two of them pinning Kirk with his chest against the table.

A piercing whistle cuts the air and Spock freezes, steps back to the limits of Kirk’s reach. 

“That’s enough,” Pike cuts. 

Kirk is shaking. Helpless terror washes through him, so much worse than the burn of fear as he was fighting, as he was killing Nero’s men. 

“Kirk. You said you knew that ship, but you couldn’t fly it alone.”

“Yes.” Hope swells in his chest. “Yes. Give me a crew. I can show them. Teach them. Enough to maneuver, enough to fire.”

“Please.” He’s not too proud to beg.

“Can we do it?” Pike’s question seems to be for Spock. Kirk breathes against the table, clenches his jaw against the urge to hurry them. 

“It is possible,” Spock hedges.

“If we destroy the Narada, what chance does Vulcan have?”

Kirk feels Spock’s wrist tense under his grip.

“Without knowing both the speed the Romulan fleet and how many ships they can bring to bear, and the exact time our own reinforcements arrive it is hard to calculate. If Starfleet arrives first, I would put their chances of winning at approximately twenty-four point six percent, given what little we know of the Romulan forces.”

“And if the Narada is here, to hold them off.”

“Assuming Kirk can produce even fifty percent of Nero’s efficiency with an untrained crew, our chances raise to ninety percent if the ‘Fleet arrives before the Romulans. Sixty if not. However, if the battle is lost and the Narada taken, the future of the entire Federation, and indeed, all of known space, may be in Romulan hands.”

Spock shakes Kirk’s grip off and kirk breathes against the table as the moment of silence stretches. 

He waits, for Pike to seal his fate, to decide if he fights for his life, for his child’s life, or dies in a cell.


	5. War Child

“Let him up,” Pike says, and the security guards step back.

Spock’s wrist still tingles from the grip Kirk had on him, unusually strong for a human. 

The security team releases Kirk and he pushes up from the table, wary. His eyes are blue, staring into Spock’s own brown.

“Spock.”

It is inconceivable that he missed Pike calling his name, but the tone of his voice suggests otherwise.

“Yes captain. My apologies.”

“This is a strain on all of us,” Pike says, and Spock supposes the criticism, that he would be emotionally unbalance by the events of the last hours, is fair. 

“I need you to pull together a team out of the survivors. The best and brightest, but also the most flexible, the quickest to pick up new skills. Don’t worry about what you’re leaving on the Enterprise. We need attack capability and basic maneuvering. With the state of our shields, we’ll be prepared to evacuate to the planet if we take much more damage anyway. When the ship is staffed, you need to take the red matter and take it far enough that if the worst happens, the Romulans can’t get their hands on it.”

“Bird,” Kirk says, a curious name for a child who has never breathed air that wasn’t cycled through a ship’s system. 

“We’ll get her on the first shuttle out,” Pike assures him.

“We can’t just dump her in a Vulcan hospital,” McCoy counters. “You saw what happened in sickbay.”

“Perhaps I can offer a solution,” Spock says before any more precious time is wasted. “My mother will be in the katric ark with the Vulcan high council. I can imagine no safer place.” And if Kirk proves to be again dishonest, the child he seems to care for so highly will be in the same danger as the elders of Vulcan. It is a way to temper the risk.

“I’ll send Chapel with her,” McCoy says. “Spock—the other Spock— too. I’ll get them ready, but I think I should be on the Narada. I already know the equipment and they’ll need a doctor on board if things get ugly.”

Pike nods. “Set it up. Quickly. Spock, you are dismissed. You too McCoy; you can send someone else to take care of me in a minute.” Spock nods and heads for the door.

“Ms. Forester, I suggest you evacuate to the planet now.”

Spock heads for the door as ordered. Behind him he hears “You two wait outside. I need a few words with Mr. Kirk.”

The two security officers step out into the hall behind him and take up positions on either side of the door. 

============

It’s no easy feat to sort an entire starship’s crew into two, and under such imprecise criteria. It is fortunate that Spock is familiar with all of the student records from making ship assignments just weeks ago. He takes up a spot in transporter room three, summons Uhura to his side to notify the crew with their new assignments, and to keep records of who was alive and well enough to serve. 

Kirk is one of the first transporter room three, Pike calling ahead to inform them of his arrival with his security detail. He comes in a step ahead of them, shoulders back and head high, his steps authoritative despite the lack of shoes—he’s even foregone the slippers he had been assigned.

“Pike orders that we contact the Romulan fleet and discourage them from coming out of warp.” He steps onto the transporter pad and his detail look between themselves and follow. 

“You are communications, yes?” he asks Uhura. 

“I am.”

“I need you.” 

She hesitates, glancing to Spock. 

“Go with Mr. Kirk. Follow any reasonable command.”

She gives him a stiff nod, and he’s not certain if she is angry at him or uncomfortable with the assignment. 

The transporter hums and the four on the pads disappear.

Spock looks down at the PADD in his hands, feels a wave of disquiet shiver through his chest. If she’d accepted the assignment on the Farragut. If she’d taken it as professionally as she just went to the Narada, he would have lost her. The very idea shakes him. 

==========

“Sir, the Narada is hailing us on a subspace frequency.”

Admiral Tebok, grand-nephew of the Emperor and seventeenth in line for succession, raises his head from the screen in his hand. 

“Put it on the main screen,” he orders, steepling his fingers in front of him. This is a moment he has awaited his entire career, his entire life for. Bringing Nero to heel will prove his worth, will advance him past those with a higher blood claim to the throne, will make his a name spoken throughout the empire.

“It appears to be a recording,” Lieutenant Orun says and Tebok frowns.

“Show it.”

The screen flickers and then the video begins. 

The man in the captain’s chair is not Romulan, though he is dressed like one, like a worker not military. A heavy coat with a furred ruff wraps around his shoulders, his chest bare. He leans forward, his stare an unnatural icy blue. 

“I am Kirk of the Narada,” the man says. His Romulan is perfect, his slight accent nothing like the other Federation stooges who have learned the language. 

“Nero is dead by my hand. The Narada is mine now. I will not surrender. I will not bow to the empire. Starfleet’s honor requires that I warn you that I will be your death if you come out of warp within the light of Vulcan’s sun, or any sun under the Federation or its allies.” 

Kirk makes a short gesture with his hand and the screen goes black. 

Tebok sits back in his chair, a frown on his face. 

Romulans do not give warnings. Kirk is either a fool to lose the advantage of a surprise attack, or he is too weak to control the ship and its crew and hopes to scare the Empire’s might from the richest prize of a lifetime. 

“Drop out of warp on my mark,” he commands, his order transmitting to the other ships in the armada. 

A weakling or a fool, this will be over quickly. When he subdues the Narada, brings back this miracle of technology to the Empire, his future will be made.

==========  
“Sir! Romulans! They’re here!” 

The young helmsman yelps the words but the warning is unnecessary. The Romulan fleet comes out of warp with their shields up and disruptor cannons blazing, cutting lines of light across the space between them. The shots flare out as they hit the Narada’s shields, blazing white where they hit. What little time he had to train a crew who had never even seen the inside of a Romulan ship is over. 

Kirk hadn’t believed there was a chance they’d take the warning that Pike insisted he give, but he would much prefer to be wrong. He counts more ships than Federation ships Nero had destroyed, D'deridex-class monsters spewing lines of Scorpions into the fight. 

“Return fire!” he shouts and the crewman on the main mining laser fires it up, sweeps it across the line of Romulan ships. A dozen are hit, shields flickering, one of the smaller ships cut in half. The Narada is made to cut planets into pieces and pick out the choice bits. Nothing as fragile as a ship can stand against it for long. Even still, the Romulans have enough ships in the battle that it will take the Narada time to destroy them all, time that the other enemy ships will spend attacking. 

Kirk scans the scene, counts the ships and their power. Lays it against the shields and armor of the Narada and knows they cannot win. 

Maybe. Maybe they can hold. Maybe they can give Starfleet time to bring their ships in from the Laurentian system.

The Romulans scatter, seeking to avoid the most devastating weapon. A handful of Birds of Prey bank towards Vulcan, another twenty spread out and try to flank around the Narada towards where the Enterprise rests in the shadow of their shields. Scorpions swarm towards the Narada. They are delicate, no shielding to speak of, but there are enough that they will get through eventually.

“Narada! We can’t see them!” a message comes in from the Enterprise.

“They seem to have some sort of cloaking device,” the helmsman says in his strange accent. “We can penetrate it but the Enterprise cannot.”

“Patching sensor data now,” Uhura answers, correcting the problem without needing an order.

Bones stands behind the captain’s chair, emergency bag on his shoulder, holding onto the back as the ship rocks beyond the power of the inertial dampeners to cushion it completely.

“Pilot, track those moving towards the planet,” Kirk says and they turn, fire mining charges into the backs of the ships that threaten Vulcan, threaten his child. 

They take a volley of hits for that, punching through the shields in their rear. 

“Non-critical,” Kirk says when the damage report is called out.

The sky behind them lights up as the Enterprise gives and takes fire, and the Narada completes the rotation, sights in on the enemies. 

A concentrated group of blasts hits the front center shields at the same time. The bridge rocks around them, throws people to the floor or slams them against their consoles. 

The gunner is injured, face bloodied and her hands lax on the firing controls. Kirk moves to her, lifts her out of the seat and shoves her into Bones’ arms. He slides into her station. As the only person who could use any station, he’d held himself in reserve, ready to step in wherever he was most needed. 

The Enterprise is listing as they turn to face it, white plumes of atmosphere venting out of the saucer section. 

“Get us closer,” Kirk says to the pilot beside him. “Get them behind our shields again.”

They move and fire. Another Romulan ship shatters. 

“I’ve broken their communication codes,” Uhura says, and then puts the audio on the bridge’s speakers. 

Kirk listens to their transmissions, as they coordinate the next move and he signals to the pilot which way to turn, how to move to intercept them, to keep the Enterprise and Vulcan safe. 

A klaxon sounds, unauthorized transporter activity. 

“They’re here! We’re boarded!” Kirk yells and the red-shirted unit moves from the bridge into the guts of the ship, phasers raised. They look too vulnerable, too soft for the task at hand. The Narada was never a military ship—the bridge is unsecured, approachable from the inside. If the foot soldiers lose, the Narada will fall.

Kirk pushes a button and another volley of torpedoes streak out. One Romulan ship seems larger, sleeker. 

“Protect the flagship!” a Romulan on the speakers says, and Kirk points at the flashy target.

“There! There!” 

The pilot turns towards the flagship and Kirk aims the laser, fires on the enemy commanders but other Romulan ships have moved in, protecting the leaders with their shields, a new one slipping in between the Narada and the flagship as the previous one’s shields falter.

“Surrender or die,” Uhura transmits in her ruling-caste Romulan, overriding the Romulans’ ship-to-ship communication, the words shaped in a way that Kirk only ever heard on the vids he stole from the crew.

“Hold them!” Pike yells on the other channel. 

The cruisers around the flagship are shifting into an offensive formation, targeted at the Enterprise and the helpless planet behind it. 

Kirk waves the nearest unoccupied body into the gunner’s seat. Jumps over the railing and into an empty station.

“Shields full!” he yells, and then “Ram them!” 

“Oh shit,” the pilot says, but he doesn’t hesitate. To their honor, not a one of the crew protests. 

Kirk takes control of the Narada’s arms, flaring them wide, drills and grinders whirling on each appendage. 

The Narada crashes into the flagship, throwing soft human bodies against hard, unyielding surfaces. The shields hold though, press up against the flagship’s protection. The arms wrap and squeeze in. Push past the enemy shields an inch at a time until the tritanium teeth latch onto the hull, atmosphere spewing as sections are pierced.

“Shields fifty percent!” the helmsman warns. Another volley of fire rocks them but Kirk holds on. Phaser fire echoes from the levels below them, the heavier bark of disrupters punctuating the whines. 

The arms twist under Kirk’s control, pushing into the holes they’ve dug. 

“Rear shields twenty percent. Left thirty. Right eighteen!”

The flagship tears apart, catches a strafing run by their own flanker. 

“Hull breach in section fourteen, section forty six, section twelve, section sixteen…” the list goes on. They’re losing. A flight of Scorpions cuts off and heads for Vulcan.

No, no no.

Kirk leaves the arm controls and runs to the captain’s chair, grabs the disruptor rifle from under it. 

“Get us clear of Vulcan for a warp implosion!” he yells. He can’t do that from here, and there are boarders between him and engineering.

“Sir…” something in the helmsman’s tone stops him and he turns.

Bright spots materialize in front of them, around them. Starfleet. They made it. The Narada, his crew, they held until help could come.

“Hold here,” he amends, staring as the remaining Romulans are destroyed or flee. 

They made it.


	6. Aftermath

Kirk and his security detail escort Leonard to sickbay, taking down some of the boarders as they go. It’s the closest Leonard has been to physical violence in a long time, and the academy drills did little to prepare him for the burn of disruptor fire inches away from his shoulder. He shields his patient on the hovering stretcher with his body and feels the shadow of Kirk behind him, between him and the enemy.

Kirk’s disruptor rifle snaps off a pair of shots and then there is a pause in the return fire. 

“Move move move!” the security officer says, and Leonard moves, down twisting corridors to the Romulan sickbay. 

“Stay and guard,” Kirk says to one of his detail and the beefy young man nods, serious. 

“Yes sir.”

Leonard doesn’t have time to laugh, but it strikes him as funny that the guards seem to have forgotten that keeping a watch on their prisoner was their primary assignment. 

“You,” Kirk says to the second one, “Come and fight.”

Kirk and his shadow head towards the distant sound of phasers and Leonard’s patient goes into cardiac arrest.

He sees Kirk once more, as he carries his wounded security guard in over his shoulder like a god-damn barbarian king from a holovid. He dumps the officer on an empty bed and goes out again without a word. 

Leonard patches the red-shirt up as best he can. The disruptor has killed every cell in a one inch radius from the front of his thigh to the back.

Uhura patches him through to the Enterprise’s medical, but they’ve evacuated, all the injured moved off to hospitals on Vulcan. There’s almost nobody left on the entire Enterprise, huge sections closed off, engineers working to keep the engine room together enough that it doesn’t blow to slag, the sickbay manned by a skeleton crew in case of emergencies. 

He gets his injured well enough to transport and then sends them down to Vulcan. 

“We have a tentative all-clear,” Uhura announces. “Our orders are to remain in our stations until reinforcements from the fleet can be brought in.”

Leonard relaxes a little and the un-injured security officer sighs out a long breath. 

One by one the bridge crew filter down to get bumps, sprains and abrasions taken care of. 

Uhura comes by--dehydration and stress headache. 

“Hey, Kirk have a communicator on him?” 

She makes an annoyed noise, tips her head for the hypospray. “He had one. Dropped it when he changed for the vid to send the Romulans.”

Leonard grunts. He’s not sure why he expected anything else. “Can you put the word out to send him back for a health-check if anybody sees him.” 

“We’ve already got the entire crew looking for him as they go about their duties. He’s too unpredictable to be left unattended.”

After she leaves, he stays put until his replacement gets in, a fresh doctor off of one of the late-arriving ships. Finally the god-damn adults show up to the party. 

Leonard’s giving the rundown of the few parts of the Romulan sickbay that he understands well enough to give their basic use when Uhura comes on the com again.

“McCoy, we have eyes on Kirk. I’m sending an ensign to take you to him.”

Leonard frowns. “Is he hurt?”

There’s a second-long pause that makes him worry.

“Unable to determine. If so, it’s not obvious.”

A cadet in a blue shirt pops his head into sickbay. “Sir? I can take you to Kirk.”

Leonard grabs his portable bag, packed full and shoulder-strainingly heavy. 

“What’s going on?” Leonard asks as he follows the ensign. One of the Enterprise’s crop of cadets. 

“They’ve brought in a temporary captain. Someone said he was the second in command of the USS Ovechkin.”

How useful. “No, I mean what’s wrong with my patient. Where the hell is he?”

They turn the corner and his guide points. There are two more Starfleet soldiers, one standing at each end of the long curve of high-ceilinged corridor.

Kirk is in the middle, sitting with his back against the wall. If he looked larger than life the last time Leonard saw him, rifle in hand, carrying a wounded man on his shoulder like he weighed nothing, he looks small now, a lost child abandoned in a battle zone. His disruptor rifle is on the floor at his side, discarded, his knees drawn up. His head is bowed, something small in his hands pressed to his forehead. 

“Is he disoriented? Combative?” Leonard asks the ensign who brought him here. 

“Unresponsive. We didn’t want to take any chances.”

Diplomatically the right choice for a security team to make.

Leonard nods. “Okay. Give us some privacy.”

The team chats quietly back and forth on their coms and then fade out to find something else to do for a while. 

Leonard comes up slow, lets his footsteps fall a little harder than necessary. 

“Kirk, hey, how’re you feeling?”

Kirk’s Romulan coat is gone. His neck and shoulders are spattered with green blood. Leonard watches his ribs as each breath is drawn in sharp and then breathed out with great effort, like his throat is tightening on each respiration. He doesn’t look up, hunched in on himself like he’s flinching from the universe. 

Leonard lowers himself carefully, sets the heavy medical kit on the ground beside him. He puts himself in what would be the center of Kirk’s sight if the man opened his eyes.

“I’d like to scan you now, is that okay with you?” 

He doesn’t expect an answer, but Kirk moves his head, the slightest nod. 

“Good, that’s good, thank you.” He pulls out the tricorder, takes a preliminary scan.

Slight dehydration, the after-effects of running on too much adrenaline for too long. Scrapes and bumps. Nothing that requires immediate medical intervention. Emotional then. Leonard has the training, but he much prefers the straightforwardness of the body over the twists and turns of the mind. 

“Mind if I sit here with you?”

He waits for an answer that never comes and then moves to the side, puts the same wall Kirk is leaning against to his back. Heaves out an exaggerated sigh. “Shit, what a day…”

Kirk makes a noise that might be a snort or a sob.

Leonard gives him another minute to find some words but he stays quiet except for the sound of his labored breathing. 

“Whatcha got there?” Leonard finally asks, looking for any way to engage the patient, to begin a dialog. He tries to puzzle out what Kirk is holding. It’s small, just slightly bigger than one hand. A ball of cloth, rags maybe, with thin yellow hairs wrapped in wire attached to one end, lighter colored than Kirk’s. 

Kirk is quiet for another couple moments and then he raises his head, his cheeks streaked with tears. He looks up, at the wall across from them, eyes wide and unblinking.

He turns the thing, the doll, so Leonard can see. It has a rough face drawn on under the hair. A strip of cloth serves as arms, attached with a knot that separates head from body. It’s objectively hideous, but obviously of great importance.

“Is that Bird’s?”

Kirk shakes his head. “Mine. Mama.”

Leonard sighs. If Nero wasn’t dead, he’d wish him so a hundred times. How young had Kirk been when he’d lost the last person in the world that cared about him? Damn it.

Kirk’s eyes flick side to side, and Leonard follows his gaze. There’s a long line along the curve of the corridor, above the eye-line of a person standing, maybe twenty centimeters high and as long as the corridor. It’s glossier than the rest of the ship, scattered with bright-glowing specks, some clustered together, some scattered like stars. It takes him a few seconds to register what the hell it is, what Kirk was hiding from seeing until Leonard came in and messed with him.

“Is that…is that the planet?” The night-side of Vulcan, population centers and isolated structures, close enough at this orbit to see.

Kirk nods. His jaw works like the words are hard to get out. “They. Some of the Romulan ships. They got through. I couldn’t…there was no way to stop them all. There were fires. Down there. Big enough to see from here. They must have gone down, inside the cities.”

Shit, and Kirk’s been sitting here, wondering if his kid is alive, for god-know how long. Probably didn’t even occur to him that he could ask someone.

Leonard pushes himself to his feet again. “Let me see what I can find out about the damage.”

He walks far enough that he can’t be easily overheard but not so far that he can’t watch Kirk, still staring out the slim observation window. 

“McCoy to the bridge.”

“Bridge here.” Uhura’s voice is a welcome familiarity. 

“Hey, do we have any word on the damage on Vulcan?”

“The preliminary report is suggesting fatalities in the tens of thousands. Six of the Romulan Scorpions got through. They are not equipped with warp drives and had no way to leave the field of combat. At least four of them ran strafing runs until Starfleet was able to send their own small fighters into atmosphere to stop them. They went down over populated areas.”

Leonard winces. It’s a damn nightmare.

“Any word on that ark place that Spock’s mother was? Do we know if it took damage?”

“I’ve asked and been told that the information is classified.” Somehow she communicates seething frustration without letting any emotion at all into her voice.

“Got it,” he says. “Thanks. If anybody needs me or Kirk, use my com. I’m gonna see if I can get him to sit down and breathe for a bit; a chance to decompress is medically necessary at this point.”

“I’ll let you know,” she assures him and then ends the exchange. 

Leonard walks slowly back to Kirk, carefully shaping the words he will say. He can’t _lie_ even though he probably should. 

Kirk looks at him as Leonard crouches in front of him, as he comes between Kirk and the strip of planet below them.

“Some of the Romulans did get through. There is damage planet-side, but the place where Bird is, it hasn't been reported as taking casualties.”

Kirk’s lips twitch as he tries to form words, stops, tries again. His entire face twists, hope warring with terror. “She’s alive?” His voice is a whisper.

“As far as Uhura could tell me, yes.” 

Tens of thousands of casualties among six billion. Spock would know the odds. It’s not that big of a stretch.

Kirk presses the rag doll to his forehead, closes his eyes.

Leonard settles against the wall again. Kirk’s shoulder brushes his, even though he thought he’d left polite room between them. If the distance was there and now it’s not…he takes the chance, leans in a little firmer. 

Kirk collapses by inches, his head lowering to Leonard’s shoulder, his face turning to press in against his neck. It’s the easiest thing in the world to put an arm around his shoulders, to draw him close and hold him as the wracking sobs shake him. 

_This is what a strong man looks like,_ Leonard thinks, _a hero who’d never been taught that showing his feelings should be a source of shame._

He holds Kirk there until his com chirps. “They’ve assigned Kirk a cabin on the Fernández. An escort is en route to your location to take him there.”

It sounds like house arrest, but better than the cell Kirk had been in before. 

“Understood,” Leonard says. “We’ll just wait right here.”


	7. Chapter 7

The outside of the Narada is bright. Bright and loud and chaotic. Bird hunkers down in a corner of Bones’ office, plays the vid of Mama over and over again. Listens to Mama saying that it will all be okay. That they’ll be together, just later. “Be strong,” Mama said, but it’s hard when Mama isn’t here. She overlaps her hands and holds them over her mouth. Presses hard to keep the sound in. She’s never been alone, never so far from Mama that she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t call out to him if one of the men saw her. 

She aches from the alone-ness. From the bright of the lights and the noise of so many people. All the things she knew— _never let them catch you, keep a weapon always, Mama will be with you always,_ the rules don’t work anymore. _Trust Bones_ but Bones _touched_ her. Only Mama touches her. Only Mama is safe. 

She can’t run. Can’t hide. This ship is not home and she doesn’t know the secret ways where nobody can find her, the places Mama shared with her, one by one. 

Even if she could disappear into the ducts and tubes and spaces between the levels, she couldn’t leave without Mama anyway. 

The door opens and she goes still. Doesn’t move a muscle beneath the blanket. Even when she was small, Mama said she was the best at not-moving. The best at sitting so quiet that the men would walk past her, close enough for her to touch, unseen in the dim light. 

“Bird? Sweetheart?” 

The voice is soft, different than Mama’s. Different from the men of the Narada. Different than Bones. It’s the other one. The one who went to get the vid from Mama.

“I’m sorry, but we need to leave the ship.”

Bird yanks the blanket off of herself, glares up at Chapel. 

“Mama is on this ship.”

Chapel crouches in front of her.

“Your mama is being moved too. He’ll be safe, but neither of you can stay here. The Enterprise is damaged. Everybody who isn’t working to fix the ship is going somewhere else. We’ve been told to go to Vulcan. A shuttle is taking us there.”

Bird frowns. “Will Mama be there?”

“I’m not sure.”

Bird shakes her head. “I’m not going.”

Chapel sighs. “Oh honey, I wish it was that easy. It’s not safe here. Your mama would want you safe, right?”

Bird frowns. Why ask something that is so obvious. They waste so many words, spew them out everywhere. It makes her head hurt. 

“When it’s time for you two to be together again, you need to be safe and you need to be where we can bring him. If we lose you, this ship, the planet below, they’re so big we might never find you again. Your mama might never find you again.”

“When.” Bird says through clenched teeth. 

Chapel’s eyebrows go up, her lips turn down at the corners. “I can’t promise that. I don’t know. All I can do is make sure you’re where you’re supposed to be when that time comes.”

She doesn’t know where Mama is. Doesn’t know where he’ll be in a minute or an hour or a day. All she can do is be where they say to be until she does know, until she can get to him.

And a weapon. She needs to get another weapon. 

“We’ll bring the vid he made for you,” Chapel says, like Bird hasn’t memorized every word, every gesture and change of tone. Mama afraid for her. Telling her what he thought would keep her safe.

She stands up and gathers the blanket around her shoulders. Chapel stands, holds out her hand and Bird looks at it, looks away again.

“Alright then,” Chapel says, her voice sounding different. Bird isn’t sure what it means.

Chapel leads the way, making sure Bird is following her as the corridors branch and twist. 

A shuttle is like a smaller ship inside of a ship. There are seats with straps on them. Chapel reaches to fasten Bird’s and Bird hisses at her. 

“It’s okay,” Chapel says, hands held visible in front of her. “I’ll let you do it. You pull this part over your shoulder, the other end around the side. All four clip in together in front of your chest. Good. Right. And then you pull until they’re snug.”

Another ‘fleet person comes in, wearing the same blue as the other Bone Smiths. A man in gray is at her side, moving slow and careful like all his parts hurt. _Spock._

He gets his straps settled and then eases back into the padding of his seat. 

She turns her head away, breathes slow so they don’t see how mad she is, how much she wants the phaser back. Spock. It’s all his fault, for making Nero, for letting him hurt Mama and Mama’s mama. 

“You are his child,” Spock says, low and slow. 

“Be quiet,” she hisses at him. There is nothing he has to say that she wants to hear. 

She expects him to keep babbling like all the other people out here do, but he makes a soft hum and goes silent.

The shuttle starts to move and Bird gasps in a lungful of air. The arms of the chair feel very flimsy under her grip, the straps suddenly so useless. “What’s it _doing?_ ” she hisses. 

“It’s okay. It’s normal. The shuttle is going to go to the airlock on the shuttle bay and then outside the ship,” Chapel says. “It’ll be a little rough as we enter Vulcan’s atmosphere.”

“I don’t _like_ it,” Bird says. If Mama was here…if Mama was here he’d wrap around her and hold her and then they’d do it anyway, like when she was learning to climb the high places or jump over the deep gaps. _Some things we do because the enemy likes to do them less. Because the enemy wouldn’t expect it._

She clenches her jaw and squeezes her fists tight and doesn’t breathe as the outer doors of the Enterprise open and there’s nothing nothing nothing beyond them. 

============

Nobody but Leonard touches Kirk on the way to his new quarters and every protective instinct he has as a doctor is grateful. Kirk’s steps are weaving, his shoulder heavy against Leonard’s by the time they get there. Exhaustion and emotional overload take their toll on even the strongest people. 

There are two guards outside the door, and it takes a security code to open, but the inside is like any other guest cabin, small but tidy—bed, dresser, a small attached bathroom and a replicator on the wall. 

Leonard doesn’t bother with the blankets on the bed, easing Kirk down, wrapping him in the warming blanket from his med kit. It’s got another four hours of charge and if Kirk isn’t producing sufficient body heat to be comfortable by then, then something is seriously wrong that’s not showing up on the tricorder. 

He gives Kirk another mild sedative, slaps a remote monitor onto him and leaves to go find someone in charge. The highest ranking officer he can get face-to-face with is the Ovechkin’s head of security. Lieutenant Rhéaume is a sharp looking woman, her dark hair smoothed back from her face into a flawless bun despite the chaos of the day. Leonard stands in front of her desk and hopes to god she’s not as stubborn as she looks like.

“As Mister Kirk’s assigned physician I am declaring a medical necessity that the man gets eight hours of rest before any further questioning or interrogation. Anything else would be a violation of the Seldonis IV Convention.”

The corner of her mouth twitches like she finds him amusing. 

“Mister Kirk is not a prisoner of war. He is a Federation citizen.”

That’s not completely unexpected. Leonard had dealt with it infrequently, when he was a civilian doctor. 

“Then I will inform his attorney that I have put an eight hour hold on any questioning, and any information gathered from him before then would be inadmissible due to violating the Seventh Guarantee.”

“Your recommendations have been heard and noted,” Rhéaume says with a note of finality, and Leonard figures he’s done what he can to get Kirk some much-needed rest. He takes a breath to thank her and take his leave.

“How about you?” she asks before he can speak, and Leonard frowns. 

“What about me?”

“Last time you got some rest?”

“A few hours ago.”

“Mmhmm. Who’s your commanding officer right now.”

He hesitates. “Pike, last I heard.”

“Pike’s relieved himself of duty for medical reasons.” 

Not a surprise, with the battle over. 

“I’m processing you through as a temporary part of the Ovechkin’s crew. I’ll assign you quarters next to your patient, but you’re off duty until those eight hours are up, barring medical emergency.”

“Yes ma’am.”

There’s a relief in having someone else take over, make that decision for him. 

A member of security is waiting for him outside Lieutenant Rhéaume’s door. All starship interiors are beginning to look the same, and he’s not sure how far he is from Kirk’s room until he sees the guards standing there, three doors down from the one they show him to.

He steps inside, into the same bland decor as Kirk’s room.

He doesn’t manage to get under the sheets of his bed either. He doesn’t even get his boots off before he allows himself to crash, to rest. 

============

“It is imperative that we speak,” the other Spock says.

Spock has spent the last fourteen point three hours piloting the ship carrying the red matter to earth, to the dubious protection of their defensive shields, and then back to Vulcan when the threat presented by the oncoming Romulan fleet was eliminated. It is illogical to feel like the effort could have been avoided, that he could have stayed and aided in the defense of the planet, but it is impossible to see the future. He had followed Pike’s orders, and could not have argued against the logic of them at the time. 

Pike was indisposed by the time Spock returned to Vulcan’s orbit, but the acting commander had ordered Spock to the katric ark, to liaise between Starfleet and the Vulcan counsel. After hours of arranging for places for the Enterprise’s evacuees to be sent, he finally has a chance to go to his mother’s side, to comfort her and assure her that he is well, and his other self chooses that moment to intercept him.

The odds of a universe in which he would stop a Starfleet officer clearly on a mission for frivolous cause are so small that he cannot begin to calculate them. 

He turns to his older self, goes into parade rest for his apparent rank as an ambassador. 

“Of course. How may I assist?”

It is disconcerting to watch his own face, older, wrinkled, distort with emotion. Relief, hope. It is too intimate, like seeing his father without his clothes. Unimaginable. Whatever lapses his other self has allowed in his discipline, Spock resolves to watch for them as his own life passes, to avoid falling into the same carelessness.

“I have been unable to discover the current status of James T. Kirk,” the elder says and Spock thinks he must have misheard.

“Kirk of the Narada,” he confirms. 

“Correct.”

“He is under arrest on a Starfleet vessel. His crimes and state of mind will be evaluated and he will be assigned psychological readjustment as required.” 

 

It is times like this, standing among the people whose lives Kirk threatened, that Spock understands old Earth’s illogical impulse towards punitive justice over useful rehabilitation. Readjustment hardly seems…proportional. 

“He needs your help,” the elder says, and Spock takes the time to consider before he flatly refuses.

“He is not my concern. If there is nothing further…”

“He _is_ your concern. He is, he will be, important to the universe in so many ways, given the chance. He has the potential for a greatness unmatched by any sentient I have ever known. The future will be diminished if he is not allowed to live and prosper.”

“That is for people other than myself to decide.”

The elder shakes his head. “You have Pike’s respect. Your advice will hold weight. Given the chance, he could have great positive impact on your life. Jim, the other Jim. He was t'hy'la to me. We were joined. We were whole, together.”

Spock draws himself taller. More rigid. The idea is distressing. Attaching himself to a disturbed individual like Kirk. 

“I cannot say how the fracturing of time has changed my own life until now, but your assumption that I have not found my t'hy'la is faulty. Now if you would excuse me, I have orders to complete.”

The elder folds his hands into the sleeves of his robe and bows his head, his worry naked on his face. 

If that is what happens if he chooses Kirk’s wildness over Nyota’s quiet strength, then his choice is clearly the more logical. Why his other self would wish otherwise remains a mystery.


	8. Chapter 8

Leonard asks for eight hours of rest for Kirk, but with the chaos in the chain of command, it’s six times that number by the time the right people for a hearing are even available. He spends the time resting himself, reading updates on Pike’s condition. His injury is improving—there’s nothing the Vulcan hospital is missing that he would have done so he strikes that off his worry-list. He can’t help thinking of the Narada’s sickbay, wondering what he could have done for Pike if he’d had more than the few minutes while waiting for Bird to wake up.

Speaking of Bird, the child is brought aboard the Ovechkin and put into a cabin on a nearby level. Under the condition that he tells neither of them that the other is on the same ship, Leonard is allowed to provide medical care for them both. There’s a scare when Bird starts running an unexpected fever, but he gets it under control with antivirals and then inoculates them both against every illness known to human and Vulcan physiology.

He watches Kirk through the cameras they have on his room. It’s not good but could be worse. He sleeps in short naps, no circadian rhythm at all. Or he lies down and stares into space, a disconnect that points at depression, reasonable given his circumstances. He looks more like a patient than a warrior, seeming content in the pale blue tunic and pants that he’s been assigned. He uses the sonic shower, but doesn’t seem to notice or care for his appearance past that.

When he does move, it’s to exercise at levels that Leonard considers borderline unhealthy, moving his body at a pace and force that his heart rate skyrockets and then he keeps it there for nearly an hour. It’s not easy for a person with his physical development to find challenge in an environment with lighter gravity than he’s used to, but Kirk manages it by doing push-ups with his feet on the bed, by using one muscle group as the resistance for another.

Leonard ‘does rounds,’ coming to Kirk’s room multiple times a day. He doesn’t talk much. Leonard expects him to ask after Bird but he never does, like the thought of her, the fear of being told that Leonard doesn’t know where she is or if she’s well is more than he can handle. 

Bird on the other hand, treats every contact like an interrogation and she’s the one asking questions. Demanding to know where her mama is, how long until she can see him, what’s being done to him. When Leonard cannot answer her questions she sulks, turning her back on him.

Leonard brings a padd full of pre-approved vids and texts for her, games to subtly evaluate her levels of education and intelligence. She disassembles it, patches it into the replicator in her room and tries to get access to the records for all the replicators on the ship, probably looking for food or items she thinks Kirk would have ordered, to find him by that method. After they take that away, she alters the replicator itself, has it make a knife made of dense edible polymers. 

After that, they have Leonard bring her meals on a flimsy tray with round-edged utensils. The guards outside her door are a lot more alert than those by Kirk’s. The cameras which seemed excessive for an eleven-year-old child end up being an appropriate measure. 

He’s in Bird’s suite, sitting at the small desk and just existing in her space, trying to get her acclimated to people who aren’t Kirk, when the call comes, “McCoy to conference room 602-A at your earliest convenience.”

“Anything else I can get for you, Bird?” 

They’ve given her old fashioned book and she is sitting in the shower stall to be as far from him as she can while she reads. He waits at the open doorway and she doesn’t look up.

“I’ll be back later. If there’s anything you need, you can ask at the door.” She doesn’t reply, but he wasn’t expecting her to. He triggers the communicator. “I’m on my way.”

The conference room contains a wall of screens, different angles of Kirk’s quarters. The man himself is curled up on the bed, knees almost to his chest, his blue eyes staring at nothing. The rise and fall of his chest is slow, despite him being awake. 

A throat clears, and Leonard jerks himself out of evaluating his patient. “Sir,” he says, a reflex of his recent time at the academy. Pike is seated at the table. Spock and an admiral—Archer, his memory supplies after a momentary blank, are on the other side. 

Conspicuously absent is Kirk’s attorney. 

Pike gestures from his hover-chair, and everyone takes their seats. 

“We’re convened today to discuss the issue of James Tiberius Kirk and his future. Any discussion on this matter is considered classified and should be treated as such.”

People nod. 

“The issues at hand are one, that he is in possession of information that could do great harm to Starfleet, the Federation and all the allied planets if he fell into the wrong hands. Two, that he threatened lives on Vulcan, even if he didn’t have the resources to carry out his threats. He used those threats to take a Starfleet officer hostage and kept them for a number of hours.” 

Leonard frowns. It had been just like Pike is saying, but it seems so long ago now, so unimportant in the face of all that’s happened since. 

“The most expedient solution would be to drop him into a bureaucratic black hole and call it a day,” Archer says. 

Leonard draws a breath to protest, but Pike beats him to it. 

“That man is the son of one of my dearest friends,” he cuts in, sharp as a knife. “Winona Kirk was one of the strongest, smartest, best people and officers I have known and I won’t see her son warehoused unless it is the absolute final option available to us.”

Archer waves a hand and Pike unwinds some of his anger.

Pike turns to Leonard. 

“In your professional opinion, what does he _need_ , going forward? What are the bare minimums for him to assimilate into Federation society in a healthy way?”

Leonard takes a long breath. 

“He needs a doctor, a therapist and a friend. No one person should be all three. He needs a support group. He needs time, to integrate at his own pace. He needs a more rounded education—there are subjects he could teach the experts on, and others that he doesn’t even know exist.” Leonard struggles to keep his voice even, professional. “A good first step would be giving him his damn kid back. The sudden separation isn’t healthy for either of them.”

“Giving him access to society also makes him vulnerable to those who would take advantage of him and his classified knowledge. To put him in an environment where Starfleet cannot control who is able to interact with him is reckless at best,” Spock argues. 

“Locking someone up for the rest of their lives when the help they’ve given far outweighs the harm of their crimes is a damn waste _at best_ and cruelty at worst!” 

“Gentlemen,” Pike says. He doesn’t have to raise his voice for it to cut through the nascent argument. 

The room goes quiet. On the vid screens, Kirk rolls over and goes still again.

“Spock,” Pike says, every bit the captain. “How long do you think it will take us to catalog the Narada and the technological advancements inside?”

Spock considers. Leonard can see the numbers scrolling behind his eyes. 

“It is impossible to even estimate a timetable, given that the advancements to be cataloged are as of yet unknown,” Spock sasses in that dry way of his. “Compounding the matter, Starfleet’s resources will continue to be depleted until new ships are built and personnel are trained.”

Pike hums like he has an ace up his sleeve.

“But you’d say in the range of years?”

Spock considers and then nods. 

“And in that time, the only people moving onto or off of that ship would be Starfleet. Already checked and vetted personnel.” 

“And possibly civilian engineers brought in as consultants.”

“Also vetted,” Pike clarifies, and then he turns to Archer. “Is there a plan in place for the logistics of the situation? Has ‘Fleet decided where they’re intending to park the thing while they examine it?”  
“If they can figure out how to take it to warp, the safest place for the Narada would be at Lehtinen station, orbiting earth.”

Pike nods like that wasn’t much of a surprise. “If Kirk would be willing to guide our engineers through the Narada’s systems, that would expedite the process, correct?”

“That is correct,” Spock says like the words are lemons.

“And Kirk could have a physician, therapist and friend on the station. He could interact with Starfleet personnel and gain social skills in a controlled environment.”

Not that Leonard is an attorney or anything, but it’s starting to sound good to him. 

“And his daughter?” he puts in. If Pike has him here as Kirk’s advocate, he’s going to see just how far he can push.

“There are family quarters on Lehtinen, some of them already occupied by staff and their children. They’ve been using a remote classroom, but a teacher could be brought up if face-to-face contact would be beneficial.”

Leonard nods. “Lord knows that child needs some fresh air and sunlight, but being close to her only parent on a station is better than trying to foist her off into some kind of foster care.”

Better for whatever foster family they would put her with, that’s for dang sure. He’ll have to make sure the parents on the station know what to expect and that Bird is integrated with the other children in a safe manner for everyone involved.

“Set it up,” Archer says, slaps the flat of his hand on the tabletop, the fall of a judge’s gavel settling the matter. He stands, already preoccupied with whatever it is that Admirals do with their days. “Gentlemen, I’ll leave you to work out the details” he says, and leaves.

Pike seems to sink into the cushions of his hover-chair, abandoning the effort of sitting attentively. 

“Doctor McCoy, do you want the position of friend, doctor or therapist?”

“What? I’m. No, I’m assigned to the Enterprise.” He’s not sure why he protests. If it’s his natural aversion to change or some fear of getting attached to the odd little family. 

“The Enterprise isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,” Pike assures him. 

Leonard takes the time to actually think it through then, playing back his interactions with Kirk, the feel of Kirk’s fingers on his face, Kirk’s tears on his shoulder. 

“I’ll take friend and I guess I can be his doctor too. You’ll need to find him a good therapist though.”

Pike nods. “Do you see any reason to continue to separate Kirk from his child?”

Leonard gives that question the consideration it deserves.

“I don’t believe so, and it might keep her from hurting herself or someone else tryin’ to rescue him. He seems interested in her being safe, and a federation citizen. As long as that’s his goal, he’s got no reason to resist.”

“I’ll let you break the news to him then,” Pike says. “He doesn’t seem to have much interest in conversation with anybody but you.”


	9. Chapter 9

Kirk stares at the smooth wall across the room. Stares until his eyes feel dry and he blinks. Considers leaving them closed but opens them again.

His fight is over. Truly over. And in that space where his purpose once rested, there is nothing. Bird is safe. As safe as he can make her. Nero is dead, and the Romulan fleet shattered. 

He’s run out of enemies, and it feels like being spaced, being flung from the ship’s gravity. No direction, no up or down. Nothing to hold onto. 

The cold of it aches into his joints. 

The door chirps, the noise that warns him that someone is joining him in his cell. It’s been Bones most often, a glimmer of light in the stretching darkness. Pike has been by three times. Asking things about Kirk’s mother that he couldn’t answer. 

“Jim.”

It’s Bones this time too, calling him by the name Spock used. Kirk sits up and manages a flicker of attention for him. 

“I have some news,” Bones says, and that’s new. Bones hasn’t offered any information before this, and Kirk hasn’t asked. 

“You have my ear,” Kirk says. He scoots to the edge of the bed.

Bones sits on the room’s only chair, facing Kirk. 

“Starfleet has decided what to do with you. If you are unhappy with this decision, tell me and I’ll take it to Pike and he’ll take it to your attorney.”

Laws again. This place is a tangle of rules and consequences. He’s starting to believe Bones’ assessment though. Nobody has beaten him or starved him. Whatever the decision, so long as Bird was safe, Kirk would kneel to their wishes. 

He nods to show Bones that he is listening. That he understands. 

“They’re going to move the Narada to Earth’s orbit, if they can get it warp-ready. They want you to go with the ship. Show our engineers and scientists how it all works. Share what you know of the tech.”

He hadn’t realized how little he wanted to go back to the Narada until the moment the words parted Bones’ lips. But his surrender had been total. Unconditional. 

“I can do this,” he says.

Bones frowns and Kirk plays back the last moments, tries to figure what he’s said or done to put that look on Bones’ face. 

“I consent.” 

Putting it a different way doesn’t seem to appease Bones any.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet,” Bones says. 

Kirk waits. 

Bones takes a breath.

“They’re going to attach the Narada to a permanent space station in Earth’s orbit. The Lehtinen. It’s a Starfleet posting, but there are civilians there also. Partners of the ‘fleet personnel. There’s kids too.”

Kirk doesn’t understand where Bones is taking the conversation. When there will be a ‘good part.’

Bones leans forward, his hand resting on Kirk’s knee. 

“They’re going to keep Bird with you. You’re her parent. You’ll live on the Lehtinen and work on the Narada. She’ll get a chance to meet a few other kids. Go to school. Learn the skills she’ll need if she’s going to be around people.”

Bird. The overwhelming feeling of missing her slams into him like a blow. He hadn’t dared hope he would see her again. The crimes he’s committed, the embarrassment he must be to Starfleet, he’d thought this cage was forever. 

His breath comes in short gasps, his eyes prickle with tears. 

“Aww, kid,” Bones mutters and moves to sit beside him on the bed. Their shoulders brush, Bones solid as a bulkhead beside him.

Kirk clenches his fists in the hem of his tunic, needing to hold something real. He breathes through the sharp sting of hope, a delicate blade that can cut him or cut him free. 

“Do you want to go see her now?”

His hands are shaking, his jaw jumping. 

“Yes. Yes please. Please.”

Bones stands, but he moves into Kirk’s space, blocking him from standing up. “We’ll go to her. I promise. But let’s get you cleaned up a little first, huh? I don’t want to face her wrath, bringing you there in this condition.”

It would scare Bird. Make her think something was wrong, that this future wasn’t the one he promised her. 

Bones steps away and comes back with a damp cloth, fresh from the replicator. It’s cool on Kirk’s face as he tips his head back. Bones wipes the tears Kirk didn’t know he was spilling. Refolds the cloth to a fresh side and presses it to his eyelids, to his lips. 

Each breath comes slower than the last, the wave of panic passing over him and leaving him shaken in its wake but able to pull himself back on course. 

“Better,” Bones decides and steps back again, puts the towel into the recycle and heads for the door. 

==============

Kirk follows Leonard to the door like he’s afraid it’s some trap, pausing for a heartbeat before he steps over the threshold. 

The two guards step back, and one of them salutes. Salutes Kirk. Leonard watches as Kirk blinks at him and reaches out to touch the man’s other elbow. The guard’s hand comes down and Kirk tics his head in something like a nod. Kirk looks so shaky that Leonard is tempted to offer him a sedative, but doesn’t want to make that escalation in care. Better to see if being reunited with his child helps.

Leonard waits until the guard gives Kirk a nod down the hallway and Kirk rejoins Leonard. 

He’s silent as they walk. Down the corridor and to a lift. Down two levels and back through another identical corridor to a door with a guard at it. The officers have already been briefed and neither moves beyond polite nods as Leonard puts his finger to the scanner. The chirp from inside isn’t loud enough to be heard, and he gives it a few seconds before he opens the door. 

The door swishes to the side and Kirk stands there, eyes scanning the room, the empty room. He balks at the entryway, eyes too wide, nostrils flaring.

“She’s here,” Leonard rushes to say. “She’s here, unless she’s escaped while I’ve been dealing with the changeover.”

Kirk swallows and licks his lips. Leonard expects him to call her name, but he makes three sharp clicks with his tongue. Waits and then three more.

And then Bird is in the doorway to the bathroom, her book falling from her fingers. 

“Baby,” Kirk says, barely more than a whisper. He goes to his knees, not quite a fall, and she rushes to him. 

He wraps her in his arms, the side of his face against hers. Her knees go out The universal translator has problems with whatever he’s murmuring to her, some bastardization of standard and future-Romulan, almost like twin-speak. They’re so quiet, a lifetime of hiding leaving its mark.

Kirk is crying, and Bird is crying. She wipes at the tears on his face and he is laughing, he is crying. He hugs her again and she finally seems to notice Leonard standing there. The joy on her face is slammed behind a wall of fury and her back goes straight.

“What did you do to him?” she hisses.

Kirk answers for him, grabbing her back when she takes a step towards Leonard. “Nothing. Nothing. I was safe. I was fed and warm. I was never hurt.”

That seems to mollify her. Somewhat. 

“I couldn’t come to you then but now I’m here,” Kirk says, and she holds on like they could be ripped apart at any minute.

He stands up, lifting her with him like she is still a toddler, her entire body curved so she can tuck her head under his jaw. He rocks her gently, murmuring soft words just for her. 

“They have family quarters prepared for you to use for a few days,” Leonard says. He’s reluctant to interrupt, but the associations Bird must have with this room are best left behind as soon as possible. Kirk nods, and Leonard leads them out of Bird’s comfortable prison and off towards their new life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have vague ideas for more, but I feel like this leaves them in a safe, hopeful place.   
> Thanks so much to @jadejabberwock for the lovely comment on the first fic that reminded me how much I loved writing this one. I cannot tell you how much I appreciated that.


End file.
